Expert says scientists don’t seek truth… wait, what?

Every year, The web magazine, Edge, asks leading scientists, philosophers, artists, and others to submit a response to a “big” question that is usually visionary or out-of-the-box. This year, the question was: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”. There have been many great responses, a few of which were summarized in a recent Guardian article that I highly recommend. Not all of the answers to the question were mentioned, but the few that were are outstanding and include: appreciating uncertainty, accepting failure, and this gem:

Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Centre for Bits and Atoms wants everyone to know that “truth” is just a model. “The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don’t – they make and test models,” he said.

“Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It’s a never-ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or destination to reach. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don’t know, not a weakness to avoid. Bugs are features – violations of expectations are opportunities to refine them. And decisions are made by evaluating what works better, not by invoking received wisdom.”

This is a very interesting answer, and one that you might expect from a philosopher of science, not a practicing scientist. And I love it.

Many with an agenda might do their best to misrepresent what Gershenfeld is saying, and I can envision a Christian fundamentalist or three that would use these words out of context. But I think the answer is outstanding and hits on the reality of scientific exploration, at least for me whose training is in biology.

What I think Gershenfeld is getting at, and I run the risk of misinterpreting as well since his was a two paragraph description in the article, is a philosophy of science known as critical realism. Critical realism (I subscribe to John Polkinghorne’s interpretation) says that there are limits to what we can actually know or describe about the world around us. Not so much in the questions that can be asked but in the precise detail and lowest level of explanation that we can achieve. That being said, critical realism posits that observations and explanations do, in fact, correspond to reality and that they’re not just human constructs. Therefore, we can know but we know that we cannot know everything that there is to know, you know?

The resulting “truth” of science then is very different from the “revealed” truth of religion and you can see why many in the field of science have a difficulty accepting and engaging positively with revelation. Scientists construct hypotheses and models to explain their observations and do their best to test them. And this is not only true about scientific data, but even the scientific method itself. It was “created” too!

Again, this does not mean that science is flawed in some way or that religious truth is “better” than scientific truth. It’s just the way it is. The beauty of science is that people anywhere can test the models giving way to peer review and either revision or confirmation of the model. There are limits to science for sure but the potential for reproducibility and the consistently seen self-correcting nature of science is what makes it such a great and successful method of inquiry.

This post coincides very well with an introductory lecture that I gave today for a course that I teach called “Critical thinking in biology” (slides here if interested). In this class, students practice the art of critical thinking by analyzing, discussing, and critiquing primary research articles and by writing a research grant proposal. It’s a course designed to help students transition from college to graduate school and is a blast to teach. Today we talked about critical thinking, the scientific method, and science in practice. It always comes as a bit of a surprise to students that there are limitations in science, that hypotheses are easy to generate but designing appropriate experiments often very difficult, that scientists have biases, yet science works so well. This is due to the nature of much of undergraduate science education but also to how science is represented by leading scientists and the media.

That’s what makes this Guardian article and organizations like Edge and its thinker-contributers such a joy to read. More, please.

I think Gershenfeld’s point goes deeper than what you discuss here, and I would be interested to know your thoughts on where the “deeper” bit might lead science and religion discussions.

Gershenfeld says that “The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth.” You seem to get as far as saying that science never *finds* truth. (At least not the real, hard, pure gold of absolute certain Truth.) Polkinhorne, in fact, explicitly stops at this point: he says that while science never ultimately finds truth, it is still truth-seeking. By contrast Gershenfield says scientists are not even *seeking* truth.

His point can be illustrated by noting that when scientists do find something that (they think) is (possibly) true, they often ignore it and come up with a model that they know does not correspond to reality. A semiconductor, for example, has lots of electrons in it and you can work out what billions of electrons are doing. Alternatively you can say that billions of electrons acting *this* way looks a lot like a hole acting *that* way. Then you ignore the electrons that you think *are* there, and concentrate on the hole which you think is *not*. You calculate the hole’s effective mass, its charge and mobility in the material. You then form compounds with the hole, such as excitons (electrons bound to holes) and polaritons (photons bound to excitons).
We do not ask whether it is *true* that the mass of the hole is such and such. We are fairly sure it is not, and we would not care if it was. Rather, as Gershenfeld says, we make a model (e.g. holes) and test it (e.g. can I make a transistor based on the model?)

The question I have not yet wrapped my head around fully is how this affects the relationship of science and religion. People like McGrath and Polkinghorne make a big thing of the fact that both science and religion are truth seeking. (And before them, C.S. Lewis was convinced that if scientific enterprise ceased to be truth seeking it would lead to the downfall of rational scientific enquiry. It is not clear to me that this is the case.) Still, if science is not truth seeking, we have two options:
– Science and religion are less similar than we thought (because religion is truth seeking but science is not. And then you might need to rethink some apologetics that was based on a similarity that is not);
– Science and religion are in fact still similar (because maybe religion is not truth seeking either. And then you would need to rethink a lot. Which may or may not be a bad thing, but without having rethought it, it is hard to tell).

I wonder how I would have answered your question five years ago when I wrote this post! For now, I would say that I think the process of science gets us closer and closer to truth, but we as scientists make the decision of when to stop the search. In some instances, the model is “good enough” and we accept what it tells us and apply it to a different scenario or ask a different question. If the technology improves we may decide to test the model again but now with the anticipation that are resolution is better. But good enough is determined by the scientist.

As for which of your two options I would prefer, I would say they both are truth seeking but it doesn’t mean they will complete the puzzle with 100% certainty. This is not difficult for science because it has always been “bottom-up” as Polkinghorne mentions where we take discrete data and generalize from it to form theories. But seeing religion as “bottom-up” is very different from how it has been viewed for centuries. This means that we cannot take Biblical verses, theological doctrines from the Creeds or Church fathers, official statements of the Catholic Church, etc. as dogmatically true but instead must “use” and synthesize them so that we can best make sense of our faith. I feel strongly that my methods should be similar if I want science and religion to speak to each other so if my philosophy of science is post-modern, that my philosophy of religion must be too.